Ant International, Mastercard and Visa have launched an interoperability partnership called Know-Your-Agent (KYA), aimed at letting card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms and online marketplaces recognize each other's approved AI agents. Each company keeps its own onboarding and risk-control process; what they're sharing is agent identity and behavioral records.
The name borrows from banking's Know-Your-Customer standard, but the subject is software rather than people. When an agent shows up to place an order on someone's behalf, the party accepting payment needs to know who operates it, whether it's authorized, and what it's done before.
Three Pillars
According to the announcement, the framework rests on three elements. First, cross-network operator traceability: every agent must be tied to a verified operator rather than existing as an independent entity. Second, shared certification requirements: agents must meet a common set of security and behavioral standards to be considered trustworthy. Third, continuous transaction monitoring: ongoing evaluation using multiple signals, rather than a single check at onboarding.
All three point at the same problem: agents make mistakes, and they can be repurposed for other things. Among the reasons the three companies cited, the risk of agents hallucinating was called out specifically — when a payment is initiated by software, it's now hard for the recipient to tell whether the authorization chain behind it is intact.
Three Companies, Three Existing Protocols
The partnership isn't starting from scratch. Three separate frameworks are already on the table: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent, and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol.
The three take different angles. Visa's approach starts from whether an agent is “the trusted one it claims to be,” with a focus on identity. Mastercard's centers on whether an action “reflects genuine user intent,” with a focus on authorization credentials. Ant International's protocol lives on the mobile-wallet side, handling how an agent completes a call within an app environment. Until now, the three paths ran independently — a merchant that plugged into one only recognized that one's credentials.
Aligning them is not a small technical job, and the announcement doesn't spell out how the merger will actually work — whether the three map onto one intermediate format, or mutually recognize each other's issued credentials, isn't something that can be determined from the public material.
Where Ant International Fits
What Ant International brings is scale on the wallet side. The figures given in the announcement: Alipay+'s wallet gateway connects roughly 150 million merchants, links to 50 global digital wallets and banking apps, and covers 2 billion user accounts.
For the two card networks, the wallet network is a second main road alongside the card network, especially in Asia. Ant International Chief Innovation Officer Yang Jiangming's framing was that interoperable KYA between card networks and wallet networks is critical to preserving trust among payment partners. Visa's Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships Rubail Birwadker's angle was that agents are playing a growing role in how people discover and buy things, and trust has to expand along with that. Mastercard Chief Digital Officer Pablo Fourez put interoperability directly as the precondition for agentic commerce to scale.
The three quotes point at the same thing: none of them can set the standard alone, and none of them wants someone else to set it either.
The $3 Trillion to $5 Trillion Figure
The figure all three companies cite comes from McKinsey: by 2030, AI agents could handle $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce transactions. That's a third-party estimate, not the three companies' own business forecast, and the gap between the low and high end is nearly 70% — a sign that even the people making the prediction aren't confident.
What matters is the window it marks. Before 2030, if agent-initiated payments really do reach that scale, the identity and authorization questions need answers by then. Right now, what the three companies have announced is the start of a partnership — no pilot list, no phased targets, and no word on who the first participants will be. When those blanks get filled in will say more about progress than this announcement does.
Sources: Ant International, Mastercard and Visa joint announcement, CocoLoop, CNBC, Reuters; the joint announcement was checked for the three KYA mechanisms, the names of the three companies' existing protocols, Alipay+'s merchant and account scale, and the McKinsey forecast range.